Reading the blood: Violence, sacrifice, and narrative strategy in the novels of Toni Morrison

A synthesis of Rene Girard's theories of violence and sacrifice and Peter Brooks' Freudian narrative model provides a critical apparatus for understanding the close relationship between them and narrative strategy in the novels of Toni Morrison. The analysis in "Reading the Blood" demonstrates that the African-American communities in Toni Morrison's novels are haunted by violence, violence that is engendered by white oppression. This dissertation explores how African-American communities respond to violence and how white subjugation of African-American populations translates into violence within African-American communities themselves. Moreover, this study considers narrative movement as a reflection of and an intrinsic function of theme in the novels, and uses Brooks' narrative model to show how Morrison's fiction is concerned with a violent history of oppression and subjugation. In Morrison's works both characters and texts struggle to come to grips with this violent past through a painful process of working through repressed, painful traumata. In Morrison's fiction, returns of repressed traumata constantly interrupt forward-moving plots, thus generating a recursive, non-linear narrative pattern that aligns Morrison's works with traditional African, oral storytelling traditions.;"Reading the Blood" devotes a chapter to each of Morrison's first five novels and treats her most recent novel, Jazz, in the conclusion. The dissertation examines how Morrison's first four novels define and re-define the problems of violence, cultural identity, and cultural survival, without offering definitive solutions. Ultimately, however, in Beloved, Morrison asserts that the survival of African-American communities depends on the revival of traditional African and African-American values and belief systems that emphasize unity, identity through community, and tolerance. Finally, this work shows that Morrison continues to explore the dilemma of violence in Jazz, where she also employs a narrative strategy that is at once postmodern, psychoanalytic, and Afrocentric.